Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, SpectacleRoutledge, 2007 M12 12 - 246 pages This book investigates the productive crosscurrents between visual culture and literary texts in the Romantic period, focusing on the construction and manipulation of the visual, the impact of new visual media on the literary and historical imagination, and on fragments and ruins as occupying the shifting border between the visible and the invisible. It examines a broad selection of instances that reflect debates over how seeing should itself be viewed: instances, from Daguerre's Diorama, to the staging of Coleridge's play Remorse, to the figure of the Medusa in Shelley's poetry and at the Phantasmagoria, in which the very act of seeing is represented or dramatized. In reconsidering literary engagements with the expanding visual field, this study argues that the popular culture of Regency Britain reflected not just emergent and highly capitalized forms of mass entertainment, but also a lively interest in the aesthetic and conceptual dimensions of looking. What is commonly thought to be the Romantic resistance to the visible gives way to a generative fascination with the visual and its imaginative--even spectacular--possibilities. |
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... appears remarkable to us now for the rapid and diverse expansion of the visual field, not only in the development of visual ... appear to have become more pressing, and more difficult to resolve in the wake of the new visual media. This ...
... appear in the present. From the mock-ruins of the later eighteenth century, to views of Rome in the Romantic period, to the popularity of scenes of Gothic ruin at the Diorama, the visual material of these chapters is largely physical ...
... appears , ” but with one important caveat . The visual doesn't simply return in the Romantic period like that repressed other , but is made . Its apparent basis in the " real " is one of the important things that Romantic engagements ...
... appears to have been banished, it turns out to have a central place. The picturesque is not simply, when examined closely, about the duplication of the real, for as Gilpin argued, the picturesque must engage the imagination as well as ...
... appear within the more insistent field of the visible, or that the invisible “clings” to the visible, as Novalis has put it. The ambivalent relation of the real to the imaginary similarly structures the prominent Romantic motif to which ...
Contents
The Fragment in Ruins | |
Ruins History Museums | |
Romantic Idealism and the Interference of Sight | |
The Diorama the Double and the Gothic Subject | |
Coleridge Schiller and the play of Semblance | |
Shelley Medusa and the Phantasmagoria | |
Notes | |
Bibliography | |
Index | |